Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written of Chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would have added to one’s enjoyment of them.  His Chapman gives us a portrait of a character.  Several of the chapters in Contemporaries of Shakespeare, however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than the summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature.  Even Mr. Gosse himself, if I remember right, in his Life of Swinburne, described one of the chapters as “unreadable.”  The book as a whole is not that.  But it unquestionably shows us some of the minor Elizabethans by fog rather than by the full light of day.

VIII.—­THE OFFICE OF THE POETS

There is—­at least, there seems to be—­more cant talked about poetry just now than at any previous time.  Tartuffe is to-day not a priest but a poet—­or a critic.  Or, perhaps, Tartuffe is too lively a prototype for the curates of poetry who swarm in the world’s capitals at the present hour.  There is a tendency in the followers of every art or craft to impose it on the world as a mystery of which the vulgar can know nothing.  In medicine, as in bricklaying, there is a powerful trade union into which the members can retire as into a sanctuary of the initiate.  In the same way, the theologians took possession of the temple of religion and refused admittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience.  This largely resulted from the Pharisaic instinct that assumes superiority over other men.  Pharisaism is simply an Imperialism of the spirit—­joyless and domineering.  Religion is a communion of immortal souls.  Pharisaism is a denial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons.  All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part of the immortal souls against the superior persons.  Religion, the reformers have proclaimed, is the common possession of mankind.  Christ came into the world not to afford a career to theological pedants, but that the mass of mankind might have life and might have it more abundantly.

Poetry is in constant danger of suffering the same fate as religion.  In the great ages of poetry, poetry was what is called a popular subject.  The greatest poets, both of Greece and of England, took their genius to that extremely popular institution, the theatre.  They wrote not for pedants or any exclusive circle, but for mankind.  They were, we have reason to believe, under no illusions as to the imperfections of mankind.  But it was the best audience they could get, and represented more or less the same kind of world that they found in their own bosoms.  It is a difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man can appreciate poetry, just as it is a difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man has an immortal soul.  But the great poets, like the great saints, gave him the benefit of the doubt.  If they had not, we should not have had the Greek drama or Shakespeare.